Before starting this book, I intended to refresh myself on what came before by reading the plot summaries on the Wookieepedia. This was a mistake. I barely had the patience to get through the summary of Part One of Aftermath, because the entire summary is 4,819 words. Take that and add it to the length of the summary for Life Debt (3,954 words), and you have enough words for a novelette. It’s pretty clear: lots of stuff happens in this series.

For all that happens, though, reading the series is a tremendous chore. There’s so much happening, and there are so many characters, it’s hard to keep up with the plot. The interludes don’t help, since Wendig feels the need to cram as many characters into this story as he can. He even brings Jar Jar back into the story, and I hear that the new canon is trying to distance itself as much as possible from the prequel trilogies.

The book ends the trilogy that’s intended to bridge the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, but it only takes us a little of the way toward the latter story. It sets things in motion, but the real focus of the trilogy is to show how the Empire doesn’t just fade away when the credits roll at the end of Jedi, and how much it takes to actually eliminate the threat. Along the way, Wendig introduces us to new characters with their own trials, and those trials come to a close in the book.

The biggest event of the book is that we finally get to Jakku to see the battle between the Empire and the New Republic. We get to see why there is so much debris on the planet, and what made it important to the Empire overall. I have to give credit to Wendig for writing some engaging action scenes involving this battle. I went into this book expecting to be disappointed, and I think it helped me appreciate the story a bit more. I’m not going to seek out Wendig’s other books, mind you, but I at least was able to recognize that he could get a few things right.

Character names, however, are not one of those things. I’m used to character names in the Expanded Universe sounding like they were made by shaking a box of Alpha-Bits, but Tolwar Wartol? Come on. This smacks of just giving up on creating a new name. Near the end of the story, Wendig tries to make a joke out of it, but it’s a little too late, and if he’s trying to be sly, instead it comes across as being obnoxious.

Wendig doesn’t give us the whole picture of his story, even when it doesn’t affect the narrative for him to do so. There’s an important scene near the middle of the book where it feels like the entire plot has fallen apart, but then fifty pages later, it’s revealed that it wasn’t the end of that particular point, and it’s told to us in an “Oh, didn’t you already know that?” sort of tone. It’s like we’re learning to play a game from Wendig, but he only tells us the rules we’re supposed to know when we come across a situation where they benefit him the most.

I powered through this book only because I committed to reading everything in the EU. After the painful experience of reading Aftermath, and then following it up with the even worse Life Debt, I would have passed on this book all together save for that commitment. I do think this is the best book in the trilogy, but this is sort of like saying The Phantom Menace is the best of the prequel trilogy movies; it may be true, but that’s not to say it’s going to win any major awards.

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"